Miller’s argument is more nuanced than you’re giving him credit for. He doesn’t just hate protesters and Islamicism, he also hates iPads and “Lords of Warcraft [sic].” And what about the music that the young people are listening to today? That’s not the America that Miller fought for on the beaches of Normandy, no sir.

Frank is a talented writer and story-teller, but he should really leave political/social commentary to people that are better informed than he is. He really sounded like an ignorant, narrow-minded douchebag with his latest comments.

I have a theory that, some time between Sin City: Hell and Back and The Dark Knight Strikes Again, the real Frank Miller was kidnapped and replaced by an impostor. I’m not willing to rule out that Skrulls were involved.

And when them dern hippies get outta the army from fightin’ them wronggodless Islammies, they can come back and be proud and thankful to be once again on true American breadlines cuz there still ain’t no jobs.

Hah, excellent comic. Good sendup of Frank, but also something a lot of people have mentioned in the last couple of days, that it’s so disappointing to realize what Frank Miller really is.. It’s really embarrassing that I used to think there was something ironic about his comics and that they were self-aware to some level, and then you eventually realize, no he’s just an idiot and a douchebag.

“It’s really embarrassing that I used to think there was something ironic about his comics and that they were self-aware to some level, and then you eventually realize, no he’s just an idiot and a douchebag.”
Summed up my feelings exactly. I almost wish I could have remained blissfully ignorant about the whole thing.

Alienating someone is never the reason not to make a comment, otherwise we’d never have discussion, and people would never tell the emperor he has no clothes. If my comments offended anyone, I’ll take it in stride, because art is about expressing oneself without fear. And this is ART land.

You are foolish to assume Occupy is small enough to be neatly inverse to waddling walmartian teaparrots who lasted half an afternoon listening to Ted Nugent brought to you by Citigroup. Occupy has lasted 60 days.

You are foolish to assume your fellow letterers, editors, actors, entertainment lawyers, retail owners, etc might not simultaneuosly be veterans (frank is not a veteran) http://youtu.be/7L0BzKMmmoI and be involved with an occupy location.

You are foolish to assume “no such thing as bad press,” but… we mean to prove you wrong by sending letters to Time Warner shareholders to inform them that Frank Miller is libeling the sale of 30,000,000 Guy Fawkes masks that have shot TW stock to $70 a share. http://dailypygmy.com/?p=1396

Frank goddamn Miller is 25 years overdue to stop pretending to be Burne Hogarth.

Love your passion. I highly doubt Frank Miller will ever see this page, though, so you might want to repost this open letter on his blog as well as here. I have to ask about Burne Hogarth…was Hogarth a John Bircher or something? I tend to go to Al Capp for my right wing hippie bashing cartoonists references, but I don’t know much about Hogarth off the page.

I refer to the “What About Jack!?” business (getting Jack Kirby’s original artwork back) when mousy longhair Frank sat quietly in adoration while loud bellowing Burne Hogarth thumped tables with his fist. I think Burne was, first and foremost, a newspaper man accustomed to lots of pressure and somewhat unaware of the diplomacy preferred for fan conventions.
That’d be about 1985 iirc. I would have been buying Stig’s Inferno #5 from you. I don’t actually mean to suggest Hogarth had the free time to indulge in John Birch/Alex Jones hysterical conspiracy fantasies -just that Frank has been parroting that performance ever since (except that he didn’t create a school for WWII vets, serve, or ever even spend time with the USO, VFW, or sick kids in a VA hospital). He is blatantly faking this tough guy talk.

Thanks for summarizing what so many of us have been thinking for a while now, Ty. Frank Miller used to be someone I could point to as an example of what the comics industry could aspire to. Now? NOT SO MUCH.

I used to love Frank, too. He was so great during the Marvel days and in interviews of the era, his world view was far less jaded. I went in there and tried to talk some sense into him for what it was worth. It’s always a sad day when one of your idols drops from that pedestal.

The only thing sadder than Miller’s unhinged rant is the number of news sites that have run the headline “Comics world shocked at Frank Miller’s OWS statement.” Haven’t most of us known for years that Miller is very right-wing? The fact that he feels this way isn’t shocking to me at all, but merely sad.

But various news sites make it sound like Miller suckerpunched all of us, like we’re all still waiting with bated breath his every utterance. Sorry Frank, the comics world has long since passed you by, and this desperate cry for relevance is not going to change anything.

Also, I wonder how Mazzucchelli feels about his artwork being used for such a purpose?

I wonder what Frank Miller back in 1988 would have thought about that “unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/awakemax/5698056219/in/photostream). Somehow I get the distinct impression that when he goes on and on about “America is at war against a ruthless enemy” and “you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism” this starts looking more and more like a last ditch effort to bolster a few meagre sales for his HOLY TERROR book 😉

There’s a link to the type of Burne Hogarth antics another commenter may have been referencing. Not so much in the camp of right wing politics, necessarily, but in his vitriolic reactions to the younger generation.

And to the others who did as well, don’t forget we’re having our annual get-together in the third booth from the back at Joe’s Diner in Wapato, Washington. We’ll move to the nearby table if we don’t fill all four seats in the booth, though…

I have tried to get through the Spirit movie, and have never gotten past the first ten minutes, which is mostly Frank’s cameo scene up near the top. The opening scenes are so atrociously off-putting that I’ve made two attempts and have been thwarted both times.

I could only get through the Spirit movie as I was home working on deadlines. At one point, I had to watch the whole thing, as the bad acting (good actors being directed badly – think George Lucas and the last 3 Star Wars films) was just comically sad. Then I marveled at how staggeringly flat and unimaginative each shot was. It was like watching the most incredible train wreck.

There was no dimension. The characters were laughable. They had no resemblance to anything Will Eisner had created for his Spirit comics. It was like watching a huge Frank Miller ego dump. I once was excited at the prospect of Miller directing a movie, but now I see that he’s completely fallen flat. He couldn’t even do a quality interpretation of his own storytelling in a film.

I was pretty much done with giving Frank Miller any more of my money after The Dark Knight sequel.

For somebody so evidently, dementedly and self-righteously convinced about the superiority of Western civilization, isn’t it funny how, 30 years ago, Frank Miller was happy to rip off the graphic style of several Japanese manga artists, most notably Goseki Kojima, in order to make a name for himself?

I mean, what, weren’t there any God-fearing Caucasian artists he could steal from?!

Also: the fedora. That Miller thinks wearing it automatically makes him into some noirish, James Elroy-esque badass may be the most pathetic aspect of his decline.

He didn’t only rip his art form Japan.
In Daredevil he ripped off Eisner,
Then dicovered Kojima and, as at that time Manga wasn’t well known, he took the credit for that style.

But when he “reinvented” his style in Sin City he started riping off from Argentina.
Just take a look at 80’s Muñoz and Sampayo’s Alack Sinner and Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia’s “Mort Cinder” and you’ll see where that style comes from.

I think I more laughed off Miller’s comments than got offended. I agree that type of world view has been present in his work for a long time – even in Dark Knight Returns – but Miller’s best work clicked on other levels so that it was less of a problem. Nice work on the comic strip.

Philo, I don’t think anyone was surprised to find that Miller has become increasingly right-wing in recent years. That’s not really the issue, IMHO.

It’s that Miller is so tone-deaf and appears to be putting forth such incredibly poorly reasoned arguments and takes such a ‘get off my lawn’ stance that surprises everyone so much. As Joe Hill points out, one doesn’t expect the author of Batman: Year One, a book written with such intelligence, to be so WILLFULLY ignorant. And honestly, the ‘Lords of Warcraft’ statement is head-scratchingly ‘low fruit’. It’s an insult you would expect from Rush Limbaugh…simultaneously implying he doesn’t know anything about World of Warcraft and infantilizing the targets of his scorn; it’s an act that’s made more mystifying when made by a man who draw comic books for a living and was involved in a RoboCop movie.

His tirade was so cartoon evil I couldn’t believe the words were not being spoken by Mr. Burns. I honestly think he wanted this backlash now that his star is fading he can blame the fact that no one is buying his books anymore, not on the horrific, freaking geometric drop in quality but the the left punishing him for his political beliefs. I seriously hope that Charles and the CBLDF put some real distance between the fund and Miller. You don’t want your champion to be some dick he tells peaceful protesters to shut up and get with the program. Maybe a visit from 3 ghosts on Christmas Eve would fix him.

“Philo | November 16, 2011 at 2:23 PM | Reply
Member of the minority here: the few who are unsurprised by this. Seriously, people, wtf? You thought Miller was a liberal? Did you actually read his GNs?”

Never thought he was a liberal (never cared) but a decade or so ago I did come to grips with the notion he was kind of a bipolar blithering idiot. I was surprised by how Pops Simpson “Ger off my lawn, you dang hippies” his blog post was. I guess he can now add senility to his circling the drain career.

I still think Miller’s simplistic world-view worked very well within the boundaries of established, well-oredered comics universes like the Batman and Daredevil universes. He only had to deal with fictional worlds there, not the complexities of the real one, so when he gave them the Miller twist, it worked. Sin City worked OK at the start — after all, he was mainly borrowing Mickey Spillane’s universe and giving it the Miller twist — but that universe is far less rich than the Marvel and DC ones, so it ran dry within a couple of story arcs.

You can see it starting in his Dark Night masterpiece — the weak parts are the ones where he tries to be politically relevant and satirical, not the ones where he’s dealing with the Batman mythos and the (somewhat cartoony) characters. (And the follow-up, where he tried to be even more “relevant”, naturally sucked.)

Everything I’ve read from him since, starting with 300, has been about a reality he doesn’t seem able to quite grasp, and applying the Miller twist to an already misunderstood reality, well… It just doesn’t work.